


the machinery of the heavens laid bare

by lunabee34 (Lorraine)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, F/F, F/M, Fix-It, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-11
Updated: 2018-06-11
Packaged: 2019-05-21 01:10:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14905646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lorraine/pseuds/lunabee34
Summary: Nebula and Tony head to Earth after their defeat on Titan.“Get up,” Nebula says.  “We should find a ship.”The man wipes his face; the boy’s ashes leave streak marks across his cheeks.  “Yeah,” he says.  “Okay.  Let’s do that.  Why not?”





	the machinery of the heavens laid bare

“Get up,” Nebula says.  “We should find a ship.”

 

The man wipes his face; the boy’s ashes leave streak marks across his cheeks.  “Yeah,” he says.  “Okay.  Let’s do that.  Why not?”

 

Nebula could take Quill’s ship, but she doesn’t.  She doesn’t want to curl up on Gamora’s bunk to sleep, doesn’t want to sit in Quill’s chair or smell the shampoo Mantis bought on Xandar or eat Drax’s strangely addictive protein cubes.  They raid Thanos’s fleet instead, take something sleek intended for a complement of ten.  She doesn’t want the edges of her grief grinding against the man’s despair, against his hopelessness.  They need their space.

 

Nebula doesn’t much care where they go.  She is without purpose now that Thanos has achieved his goal.  Perhaps she will track him down one day and commit suicide at the end of his gauntlet, but that seems as meaningless as poisoning herself or holding a live grenade as it explodes in her hands.  She has all the time in the universe to kill herself; for now, she’ll go where this human, where Tony, wants to go, and where he wants to go is home.

 

“Let’s go to Earth,” Tony says.  His face is still streaked.  He’s holding himself awkwardly in the tactical officer’s chair; he’s treated Thanos’s stab wound in some way, but it clearly pains him.  “Maybe some people I care about are still alive.”

 

Nebula lays in a course for Terra.  She shows Tony the shower and the med-bay and where the rations are kept.  And then she leaves him alone. 

 

The ship is on auto-pilot, but Nebula sits in the captain’s chair anyway.  She knows she should mourn Gamora, but she can’t.  Not yet.  Their peace was still too tentative, still too fragile, too raw, too precious—Nebula could slice herself open on that splintered and precarious peace.  So she watches the stars through the forcefield and thinks about Mantis instead.

 

Mantis was deeply irritating.  And naïve.  And easily confused.  Also kind and loyal.  And once, she kissed Nebula in the docking station of Zebulon 4 while they were waiting for Quill and Drax to bring back an informant from one disreputable bar or another; sometimes Nebula accompanied them on what Quill liked to call their missions—when her sister asked her to or when Nebula’s loneliness grew too strong to bear.  “I think we should kiss,” Mantis said, and then she closed her eyes and pressed her lips to Nebula’s.  The fine motors in Nebula’s lips trembled where they touched.  “See?” Mantis said.  “Wasn’t that nice?”

 

Nebula regrets that she didn’t answer. 

 

The comm unit sounds, jerking Nebula out of her reverie.  “Please,” a small, desperate voice says.  “Please help us.  We don’t know how to fly the ship.  Please, somebody, help.”

 

“Is that a kid?” Tony says from behind her, and Nebula nearly startles again.  She has to get control of herself; grief is making her sloppy.

 

“Identify yourself,” Nebula says over the comm. 

 

The small voice says, “I’m Kelar, and my brother is Manry.  Our parents are salvagers, and we were taking a load of scrap back to Knowhere when they just turned to ashes.”  The small voice starts to break.  “I don’t know how to fly the ship; we’re too little.  I don’t know what to do.”

 

“We going to help them?” Tony says.

 

“That depends on how quickly you want to get back to Earth.”

 

Tony drums his fingers on the back of the captain’s chair.  Nebula finds this extremely annoying.

 

“Are you still there?” the small voice says.  “Are you still there?”

 

“We can’t leave them,” Tony says.  “Pepper wouldn’t want me to . . . We can’t leave them.”

 

Nebula shrugs.  She is certain that Gamora would also want her to help these orphans, but Nebula isn’t ready to let her dead sister’s moral code dictate her choices.  For now, Nebula is content to let Tony decide for them both.

 

“Kelar, we will dock with your ship momentarily.  Do you know how to open the airlock?”

 

The children are traumatized but not damaged in any way.  They dutifully pack up some clothes and other belongings and follow Nebula through the airlock to Thanos’s ship.  They’ll tow the salvage ship behind them; it and the cargo are the only wealth the children now own, and they’ll need plenty of units to sustain them until they’re old enough to work.  They have family settled on an asteroid cluster, so Nebula lays in a course that will take several days to complete.  She hopes that some of that family is still living and able to take in the children.  If not, well. Maybe some neighbors will be willing to house them.

 

Tony seems as unused to children as Nebula; he keeps stepping outside of the range of their reaching hands and telling them not to touch things or ask questions.  Kelar crawls up in Tony’s lap anyway and winds her little arms around his neck.  After a few moments of what looks like abject terror, he hugs her back.  Then Manry wants a hug, too, and Nebula escapes to her quarters before anyone can suggest that she participate.

 

She finds Tony later leaning against the wall of the children’s quarters and watching them sleep.  “Right before all this happened, I dreamed that Pepper and I were going to have a kid,” he says.  He doesn’t look at Nebula while he’s talking, and Nebula is grateful for that courtesy.  “I didn’t think I wanted kids.  My dad and I, we didn’t, it wasn’t.”  Tony stops and sighs.  “Let’s just say I wasn’t interested in repeating family history.”

 

That Nebula can relate to.  The only example of a parent she can remember is not one she’d care to emulate.  Of course, she doesn’t think Tony’s father was located anywhere near Thanos on the continuum of horror, but she can appreciate Tony not wanting to replicate the mistakes made by his father however mundane they might seem next those of a father who tortured her as Thanos did.

 

“What about you?” Tony says.  “Any little Nebulas running around the galaxy?”

 

“No.  Thanos removed most of my internal organs and replaced them with machinery long ago.  I could not bear children even if I wanted to,” Nebula says.  “And I don’t.”

 

Tony looks at her then.  “Your dad sterilized you?  Jesus, I thought I had problems with the old man.”  Then he looks at her again with an expression she can’t read on his face.  “Wait a minute?  You’re a cyborg?”

 

Nebula is unfamiliar with that term, but she assumes it has something to do with the parts of her that are mechanical.  She starts to feel uncomfortable, even angry; no matter the physical advantages her robotic parts give her, Thanos always meant them as punishment, as a way to take away her identity, to make her less than a person.  They are a symbol of all the many ways Nebula has failed—failed in battle, failed to best Gamora, failed to earn Thanos’s love.  Nebula will not let this Terran ridicule her; she starts to speak, but Tony cuts her off.

 

“That’s cool,” he says.  “I mean, not the part where you didn’t have a choice, but the part where you can’t get appendicitis.  If I thought Pepper would go for it, I’d 100 percent install some vibranium ribs.  Broken ribs are the worst.” 

 

Nebula knows what cool means from Quill’s exhausting speeches on the magnificent dancing of Kevin Bacon, and she realizes that the expression on Tony’s face is curiosity and wonder, not scorn.  Her ire starts to dissipate.  She says, “What changed your mind about children?”

 

“I don’t know.  A lot of things.  One of the Avengers has a secret family.  Adorable rug rats.  Seriously, these kids are way cuter than Clint ever thought about being.  Clearly, they take after their mother.  Pepper would make a great mom, obviously.  And I’m not getting any younger, we’re all going to die some day, existential crisis, yadda yadda.  Mostly, though?  The Parker kid.  Spiderman.”

 

Nebula says, “The boy who died.”

 

“Yeah.  The boy who died.”  Tony scrubs his hand over his face and pushes back from the wall.  “Little too much sharing and caring for me right now, Blue.  I’m going to catch a few Zs before the monsters wake up.”

 

That night, Nebula dreams about Mantis.  In the dream, Mantis kisses her just as she did before, but this time, Nebula kisses her back.  This time, Nebula runs her fingers through Mantis’s dark hair and presses their bodies close together.  This time, Nebula says, “That was more than nice,” and Mantis smiles at her like she’s special, like she’s not a failure.  When she wakes up, Nebula is smiling, too, until she remembers that Mantis is dead and no evidence exists to suggest Nebula isn’t the dismal failure Thanos always believed her to be.

 

When they finally arrive at the asteroid cluster, Kelar and Manry’s relatives are still alive, some of them anyway.  They accept the children and the ship and the cargo, and then Nebula and Tony are free to continue to Terra.  They linger over the next meal after the children are gone; Nebula does not miss the children exactly, but the ship seems colder in their absence.  She suspects Tony feels the same way.

 

“I’ve been thinking,” Tony says.  “Strange told me he’d let me and Peter die before he’d give up the Time Stone.  But then he just handed it over to Thanos, and it can’t be because he gives a rat’s ass about saving me.  I think maybe giving the stone up set in motion the one future he saw where we beat Thanos.”

 

Nebula considers Tony’s hypothesis and feels a glimmer of hope.  Maybe Tony is right.  Maybe the fight isn’t over yet.  Despite her attempts to tamp it down, that hope takes root and begins to grow.  Nebula thinks of Gamora singing along to Quill’s incomprehensible music.  She thinks of Mantis giggling, one hand pressed to her mouth, and the memories don’t hurt as badly as they did just a moment before.

 

She thinks Tony is wrong about what Strange set in motion, though.  “If the key was giving Thanos the Time Stone, he’d have done that as soon as Thanos demanded it.  If you’re right, Tony, whatever hope we have depends on your life.”

 

“That’s a lot of pressure.”

 

“Yes, it is.”

 

They stare at each other for a long second, and then Tony grins at Nebula.  “I do my best work under pressure.”

 

By the time they enter orbit around Terra, Tony and Nebula have ferried twelve more refugees to various points in the galaxy.  They’re towing two derelict ships, one of them loaded with Raxian wine, and Tony has adopted a Xandarian moncat they found hiding under one of the wine crates.  The moncat is sleeping on top of Nebula’s feet, and Nebula is pretending she finds its purr obnoxious rather than soothing.

 

“Moment of truth,” Tony says and opens the comm.  Nebula holds her breath.

 

A female voice answers, “Pepper Potts speaking,” and tears run down Tony’s face.

 

Nebula feels like a voyeur, so she leaves the bridge.  She’s happy for Tony, though.  At least one of them still has family left, and maybe, just maybe there’s a way out there for Nebula to get hers back.  If she does, if her hope turns into something real, Nebula vows never to let them go.

 

 

 

 


End file.
